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Wondering why I’m blogging about this? Read more about my quest for badges! Earlier, I explored how DNS works and explained how I chose my hosting. I’m now going to dive into how the two click together. This is all to do with the bit around Step 7 in my post on DNS, the actual step where something takes responsibility for a domain and provides the relevant information. For this, I’m going to talk about my domain nickjackson.me, because it covers two of my three hosting flavours as well as a couple of other interesting bits...

Wondering why I’m blogging about this? Read more about my quest for badges! Getting hosting for a website is an essential step to making it available for the world to see. Unfortunately for a newcomer, this can be a minefield to navigate. I’m going to briefly explain about the most common type of hosting for someone looking to get started in the world of websites, and then I’ll leap into explaining the three (yes, three) different types of hosting that I personally use. First up, shared hosting. If you grab a cheap and cheerful hosting service from the...

Wondering why I’m blogging about this? Read more about my quest for badges! The web is full of acronyms, thrown about by people like me as shorthand for the myriad of different systems which are involved in getting a web page out of the mind of the developer and into your web browser. One of these acronyms is DNS, three little letters which pretty much underpin the entire internet as you know it. They stand for “Domain Name System”, and I’m going to explain what DNS is, why it’s important and how it works. Before I can leap into...

Wondering why I’m blogging about this? Read more about my quest for badges! This is a bit of an odd blog post, since although I’ve been using text editors for many, many years I have recently moved away from my trusty standby and am giving a new one a whirl. That comes later though… Back when I was first learning the craft of building websites I, like many others, did all the work in Notepad on Windows. It was not the best tool for the job by a long shot, lacking pretty much every single feature other than the...

Wondering why I’m blogging about this? Read more about my quest for badges! One of the more unusual things that the Webmaking 101 course has me doing is writing HTML by hand. On paper. With a pen. Unfortunately, whilst I have a pen, I don’t have any paper. Fortunately, I do have my trusty iPad, a stylus, and the Paper app. The page that I’ve been tasked with building is pretty simple (and it’s even HTML5), meaning that I was able to scrawl it down relatively quickly (and in one go). Bonus points if you can actually...